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Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason
Renaissance logician, philosopher, humanist, and teacher, Peter Ramus (1515-72) is best known for his attack on Aristotelian logic, his radical pedagogical theories, and his new interpretation for the canon of rhetoric. His work, published in Latin and translated into many languages, has influenced the study of Renaissance literature, rhetoric, education, logic, and—more recently—media studies.
Considered the most important work of Walter Ong's career, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is an elegant review of the history of Ramist scholarship and Ramus's quarrels with Aristotle. A key influence on Marshall McLuhan, with whom Ong enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles, this challenging study remains the most detailed account of Ramus's method ever published. Out of print for more than a decade, this book—with a new foreword by Adrian Johns—is a canonical text for enthusiasts of media, Renaissance literature, and intellectual history.
Considered the most important work of Walter Ong's career, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is an elegant review of the history of Ramist scholarship and Ramus's quarrels with Aristotle. A key influence on Marshall McLuhan, with whom Ong enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles, this challenging study remains the most detailed account of Ramus's method ever published. Out of print for more than a decade, this book—with a new foreword by Adrian Johns—is a canonical text for enthusiasts of media, Renaissance literature, and intellectual history.
436 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 5, 2018
To write an excellent monograph is a challenge, but to write a polyvalent work of simultaneously broad and erudite scholarship is an astounding feat. Ong's book pinpoints the humanist pedagogical "reforms" of Peter Ramus as the nexus of several crucial historical developments that intersect in the program of this one man.
The birth of methodology: Ramus' anti-Aristotelian polemics rendered him a controversial figure in his day, and his attempts to reconfigure the educational curricula employed by the Scholastic universities led his critics to decry him for a weak methodus (at this point understood as the way through one which one proceeds through their subject matter). Ong contends that Ramus unintentionally spawned the question of method which would become central for Descartes and haunt the natural and human sciences ever since.
Print and pedagogical reform: Ong also argues that Ramus works on rhetoric and dialectic were among the first to make full of use of print technology. By creating clear diagrams and charts on the page, by simplifying the abstruse concatenations of medieval logic, by constantly revising his works to respond to critics, and by harnessing the productive capacities of the printing press, Ramus was able to disseminate his educational program across Europe, becoming the central figure for groups such as the Puritans of New England. Ong stresses that Ramus' reform of method and pedagogy was not motivated by philosophical reasons as much as the need to reform the inefficiencies of scholastic educational practices.
Debunking the myth of Thomism: While Ong's preference for Catholicism is apparent throughout the book (he was a Jesuit priest after all), he has no sympathy for the 20th century nostalgia for Thomism that characterized neo-scholasticism (Maritain and MacIntyre later on). Ong clearly shows that the idea that Thomism reigned supreme before Scotus or the Reformation has zero historical grounding. When Aquinas died, the University of Paris decided they only wanted to preserve a few his commentaries and his treatise on building aqueducts. The vast majority of scholastic institutions consisted of logicians. (Theologians constituted a significantly smaller number of virtually every faculty and their voice generally remained unheard in scholastic educational programmes.) In terms of educational dissemination, Thomism was at best a marginal doctrine. Ong also rejects the traditional realist-nominalist distinction often used to bifurcate the Western philosophical tradition between Scotus and Ockham. He provides a compelling argument for how these two categories are unhelpful for understanding medieval and Renaissance thought.
Visual space, media ecology and restructuring the mind: Ong is very well known for his contributions to media ecology, and he argues in this work that the technology of the print book was part of a larger process of constructing and defining knowledge almost exclusively in visual and spatial terms. Charts and diagrams are visual ways we contain and delineate knowledge, and philosophical vocabulary became increasingly visualist in how it described its processes. For example, to define is to set a limit or boundary on a space. For Ramus, the nature of things was not conveyed through oral dialogue but through the written word and its containment in visual spaces. Scholastic pedagogy featured the oral monologue of the professor while humanist pedagogy featured the text as the primary instrument for truth and understanding. The humanists engaged in oral dialogue for the sake of discerning the more real truth contained (note this is also a spatial concept) within the written/printed text.
Literary and philosophical impact of Ramist pedagogy: Ong also draws fascinating attention to a variety of ways that Ramism gave birth to the greatest minds of the Renaissance. He argues that it was only because education shifted from listening-only to dialogue and exercises that required the students to think and imagine more, that great thinkers and writers of the later Renaissance like Shakespeare were possible. He argues that the visualist typology of Ramus' works were an important precursor to the highly visual style of the metaphysical poets among others.
There are a wide variety of other historical, etymological, pedagogical, and philosophical arguments that Ong convincingly weaves into his narrative, and it is truly remarkable that he could cover so much ground in his studies (especially since he personally tracked down thousands of various copies and editions of Ramus' works). This is truly a landmark study, a classic which is essential for anyone interested in intellectual history, methodology, media ecology, or the history of the book.
The birth of methodology: Ramus' anti-Aristotelian polemics rendered him a controversial figure in his day, and his attempts to reconfigure the educational curricula employed by the Scholastic universities led his critics to decry him for a weak methodus (at this point understood as the way through one which one proceeds through their subject matter). Ong contends that Ramus unintentionally spawned the question of method which would become central for Descartes and haunt the natural and human sciences ever since.
Print and pedagogical reform: Ong also argues that Ramus works on rhetoric and dialectic were among the first to make full of use of print technology. By creating clear diagrams and charts on the page, by simplifying the abstruse concatenations of medieval logic, by constantly revising his works to respond to critics, and by harnessing the productive capacities of the printing press, Ramus was able to disseminate his educational program across Europe, becoming the central figure for groups such as the Puritans of New England. Ong stresses that Ramus' reform of method and pedagogy was not motivated by philosophical reasons as much as the need to reform the inefficiencies of scholastic educational practices.
Debunking the myth of Thomism: While Ong's preference for Catholicism is apparent throughout the book (he was a Jesuit priest after all), he has no sympathy for the 20th century nostalgia for Thomism that characterized neo-scholasticism (Maritain and MacIntyre later on). Ong clearly shows that the idea that Thomism reigned supreme before Scotus or the Reformation has zero historical grounding. When Aquinas died, the University of Paris decided they only wanted to preserve a few his commentaries and his treatise on building aqueducts. The vast majority of scholastic institutions consisted of logicians. (Theologians constituted a significantly smaller number of virtually every faculty and their voice generally remained unheard in scholastic educational programmes.) In terms of educational dissemination, Thomism was at best a marginal doctrine. Ong also rejects the traditional realist-nominalist distinction often used to bifurcate the Western philosophical tradition between Scotus and Ockham. He provides a compelling argument for how these two categories are unhelpful for understanding medieval and Renaissance thought.
Visual space, media ecology and restructuring the mind: Ong is very well known for his contributions to media ecology, and he argues in this work that the technology of the print book was part of a larger process of constructing and defining knowledge almost exclusively in visual and spatial terms. Charts and diagrams are visual ways we contain and delineate knowledge, and philosophical vocabulary became increasingly visualist in how it described its processes. For example, to define is to set a limit or boundary on a space. For Ramus, the nature of things was not conveyed through oral dialogue but through the written word and its containment in visual spaces. Scholastic pedagogy featured the oral monologue of the professor while humanist pedagogy featured the text as the primary instrument for truth and understanding. The humanists engaged in oral dialogue for the sake of discerning the more real truth contained (note this is also a spatial concept) within the written/printed text.
Literary and philosophical impact of Ramist pedagogy: Ong also draws fascinating attention to a variety of ways that Ramism gave birth to the greatest minds of the Renaissance. He argues that it was only because education shifted from listening-only to dialogue and exercises that required the students to think and imagine more, that great thinkers and writers of the later Renaissance like Shakespeare were possible. He argues that the visualist typology of Ramus' works were an important precursor to the highly visual style of the metaphysical poets among others.
There are a wide variety of other historical, etymological, pedagogical, and philosophical arguments that Ong convincingly weaves into his narrative, and it is truly remarkable that he could cover so much ground in his studies (especially since he personally tracked down thousands of various copies and editions of Ramus' works). This is truly a landmark study, a classic which is essential for anyone interested in intellectual history, methodology, media ecology, or the history of the book.
January 28, 2009
Ong was a student and follower of Marshall McLuhan, and Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is something of a historical exposition of some standard McLuhan themes. Fortunately, Ong eschews McLuhan's stylistic idiosyncrasies, making it accessible to the average reader and perhaps a good starting point to introduce McLuhan's particular sociology of knowledge. Regardless, the book deals with the 16th Century logician Peter Ramus. Ong's principle claim is that before Ramus introduced a topological system for the organization of knowledge which became so widespread that it altered the way Europeans perceived knowledge. Where something like a text was once considered discursive -- the author initiated the reader into a body of knowledge -- Ramus's system introduced the idea that knowledge could be broken down into individual components. Ramists applied a dialectical mnemonics, breaking down any body of knowledge into binary trees (the kind you'd see if you ever studied Chomsky's transformational grammar). Ramist logicians claimed to know everything about a given subject merely from the fact that they broke down and memorized the binary tree. Ramism quickly fell out of favor in the Universities (for the obvious reasons), but there influence on what consititues knowledge remained.
February 22, 2011
Ong is really, really funny. For an academic priest. Still, I kept writing little smiley faces in the margins in all the places he lets go a sharp dig into Ramus, who comes across as a sloppy scholar, simplistic educator, and wildly fortunate historical figure (in societal influence, not in his personal life--he was killed in the St. Batholomew's Day Massacre). I'm still a little hazy about everything Ramus did in logic, but Ong will follow pages and pages of careful scholarship with nice little phrases that explain what he just proved. And sometimes they are quite witty indeed.
December 25, 2023
Simultaneously outstanding and utterly frustrating. The depth of his research into Ramus is unparalleled (so this work will remain indispensible), but his overt hostility and frank dislike of Ramus is clear throughout, and distortingly so. One recent scholar (Hotson) has accused Ong of presenting a virtual caricature of Ramus, and I reluctantly have to agree.
Ong presses Ramus into service of an intellectual trajectory at odds with Ramus's own goals and ambitions, namely to rightly order learning by a universal dialectical method grounded in Platonic realism, thus uncovered the sound 'natural' reason of things. Ong's agenda instead is to make Ramus a key exemplar and influence on an alleged shift from oral to visual mentalities, a thesis problematised by the widespread use of branching visual charts in medieval manuscripts well before Ramus (see the recent work of Even-Ezra on this, for example). This thesis has distorted more than a generation of scholarship on Ramus, Ramism, and upon the signficance of Ramism among puritans.
Rather than starting here, read Skalnik for an introduction to Ramus, Hotson's works on the reception and development of Ramism, Perry Miller's longstanding classic on New England puritanism for its reception there, and then especially Burton's new book for Ramism's place in the long Augustinian and Franciscan tradition of Christian Philosophy and concern to produce a scriptural method.
Ong presses Ramus into service of an intellectual trajectory at odds with Ramus's own goals and ambitions, namely to rightly order learning by a universal dialectical method grounded in Platonic realism, thus uncovered the sound 'natural' reason of things. Ong's agenda instead is to make Ramus a key exemplar and influence on an alleged shift from oral to visual mentalities, a thesis problematised by the widespread use of branching visual charts in medieval manuscripts well before Ramus (see the recent work of Even-Ezra on this, for example). This thesis has distorted more than a generation of scholarship on Ramus, Ramism, and upon the signficance of Ramism among puritans.
Rather than starting here, read Skalnik for an introduction to Ramus, Hotson's works on the reception and development of Ramism, Perry Miller's longstanding classic on New England puritanism for its reception there, and then especially Burton's new book for Ramism's place in the long Augustinian and Franciscan tradition of Christian Philosophy and concern to produce a scriptural method.
July 1, 2021
Still an Important Classic and Reference on Ong and Ramus - Previous reviews certainly hold true about the importance of Ong's effort.
Adrian Johns' forward in this edition, asks "Why study Ramus?" and indicates the cultural phenomenon that occurred when Ramus's charts went viral in the mid to late 16th century. He summarizes Ong's explanation regarding this translation of thought into visually oriented branching diagrams printed on a page. The summary addresses Ramus contribution to "eye" oriented approaches (vs. verbal / auditory or "ear"), attention to steps or methods in arriving at a conclusions or outcomes, and foundation for many succeeding educators and thinkers such as Descartes and Newton.
In addition to Johns' forward, the inclusions of Ong's preface for an earlier paperback edition and his original forward are very helpful. In the former, Ong mentions that had he done this work later he would have included attention to the resemblance of Ramus' binary dichotomized charts with those of digital computer diagrams. For Ong, this subterranean parallel was as if Ramus was writing programs 400 years before computers with similar consequences to what is occurring today in the modern world.
Although quite dense and detailed, reading Ong's Ramus yields many rewards and insights into the transition to the modern mind.
Adrian Johns' forward in this edition, asks "Why study Ramus?" and indicates the cultural phenomenon that occurred when Ramus's charts went viral in the mid to late 16th century. He summarizes Ong's explanation regarding this translation of thought into visually oriented branching diagrams printed on a page. The summary addresses Ramus contribution to "eye" oriented approaches (vs. verbal / auditory or "ear"), attention to steps or methods in arriving at a conclusions or outcomes, and foundation for many succeeding educators and thinkers such as Descartes and Newton.
In addition to Johns' forward, the inclusions of Ong's preface for an earlier paperback edition and his original forward are very helpful. In the former, Ong mentions that had he done this work later he would have included attention to the resemblance of Ramus' binary dichotomized charts with those of digital computer diagrams. For Ong, this subterranean parallel was as if Ramus was writing programs 400 years before computers with similar consequences to what is occurring today in the modern world.
Although quite dense and detailed, reading Ong's Ramus yields many rewards and insights into the transition to the modern mind.
October 22, 2021
A salutory remark needs to be given to Ong for the dialectical exhaustiveness of his approach to Ramism. Although Ramism can simply be said of its’ degradatory devolution from the true auditory human experience to one that is visual, a more significant finding is to also be said for Ong’s effort to distinct the first original dialectic into visual dialectic.
Visual dialectic may have received its’ praise through Ramism, in its’ pedagogical context - to teach little boys in school - if it has any other significant use at all, but true Aristotelian dialectic serves a higher and better purpose, transcendent of the former.
Alas, the world today is convinced of both but the repression of the aural experiential world is far more depressed than it has ever been in developing countries. Further studies on the extramural world as opposed to the internal organisation of the psychological mind can provide an interesting perception to this devolution. The salutary and invaluable study by Ong can receive its’ praises - frozen in this visual virtual space should he be alive today to receive its’ credit.
By the dawning of the Gutenberg era - that is the capability of mass printing and its’ pedagogical approach to life, Ramism gained its’ popularity much with Protestantism. As Ong has mentioned, perhaps it is also because of Ramus’ own religion and religious upbringing itself that caused the rejection of his publication in Italy and Spain where the mass audience is Catholics at large. In opposition it receives better attention among the Calvinists and the Puritans. By aiming itself with pedagogical tool, the Scripture itself can be treated and reduced from its’ original oral-aural world into diagramattic visuals. Perhaps it is much thanks to Ramism that the modern theology has been much charged by this motion to further educate uneducated men and in turn allows portability of the Canonicals away from its’ original context and purpose. The communicative nature of the Scripture has been made silent by classroom introversion and diagrammatic immersion, reducing its’ purpose to self-immersion and reflection. By separating the communicative nature of the Scripture to the new visual-analytical self-space, theology has been made mute. Like Ramism itself, sentences and formulatic alphabetical arrangement aimed at ‘soon to be educated’ men has been made frozen, formula like, in which by its’ own nature made disparaged and dis linked from its’ main intention and purpose. Attempts at communication has to be done in inverse - by treating listeners as students in school using crystallised ‘methods’ and ready made topical formula, easy to digest, devoid of any discourse in natural logic.
New theologians - unable to explain the dialectic nature of the Scripture will be made upset if any of them is challenged at all (it was probably received by them in the same authoritative manner in curriculum and inside the classroom). The authoritative nature is apparent throughout university classrooms from the Ramist era to the today’s world. Perhaps it is St. Thomas Aquinas who managed to maintain the bridge between the two disciplines. When the aim of the modern theology is to reject other disciplines, Aquinas managed the reverse.
Visual dialectic may have received its’ praise through Ramism, in its’ pedagogical context - to teach little boys in school - if it has any other significant use at all, but true Aristotelian dialectic serves a higher and better purpose, transcendent of the former.
Alas, the world today is convinced of both but the repression of the aural experiential world is far more depressed than it has ever been in developing countries. Further studies on the extramural world as opposed to the internal organisation of the psychological mind can provide an interesting perception to this devolution. The salutary and invaluable study by Ong can receive its’ praises - frozen in this visual virtual space should he be alive today to receive its’ credit.
By the dawning of the Gutenberg era - that is the capability of mass printing and its’ pedagogical approach to life, Ramism gained its’ popularity much with Protestantism. As Ong has mentioned, perhaps it is also because of Ramus’ own religion and religious upbringing itself that caused the rejection of his publication in Italy and Spain where the mass audience is Catholics at large. In opposition it receives better attention among the Calvinists and the Puritans. By aiming itself with pedagogical tool, the Scripture itself can be treated and reduced from its’ original oral-aural world into diagramattic visuals. Perhaps it is much thanks to Ramism that the modern theology has been much charged by this motion to further educate uneducated men and in turn allows portability of the Canonicals away from its’ original context and purpose. The communicative nature of the Scripture has been made silent by classroom introversion and diagrammatic immersion, reducing its’ purpose to self-immersion and reflection. By separating the communicative nature of the Scripture to the new visual-analytical self-space, theology has been made mute. Like Ramism itself, sentences and formulatic alphabetical arrangement aimed at ‘soon to be educated’ men has been made frozen, formula like, in which by its’ own nature made disparaged and dis linked from its’ main intention and purpose. Attempts at communication has to be done in inverse - by treating listeners as students in school using crystallised ‘methods’ and ready made topical formula, easy to digest, devoid of any discourse in natural logic.
New theologians - unable to explain the dialectic nature of the Scripture will be made upset if any of them is challenged at all (it was probably received by them in the same authoritative manner in curriculum and inside the classroom). The authoritative nature is apparent throughout university classrooms from the Ramist era to the today’s world. Perhaps it is St. Thomas Aquinas who managed to maintain the bridge between the two disciplines. When the aim of the modern theology is to reject other disciplines, Aquinas managed the reverse.
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November 2, 2008Ong is one of the few writers of his ilk who is both scholarly and readable in this important book about the rise of a figure and a movement and the reconstruction of an idea in an epoch. Should be required reading for anyone studying 16th and 17th Century - the influence of Ramism on writers like Milton and Bacon is undeniable. Thankfully, Ong has reduced into a digestable but complete form. If you're in my position, this is the type of book you want to write. Too bad I will never be able to write it.
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